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This paper asks whether the 'rainbow' coalition position of many black leaders with respect to immigration restrictions is counter to the broad aims of improving the lot of African Americans in the United States. It begins with an examination of the economic effects of immigration, presenting original estimates of the size and location of the unauthorized Mexican immigrant labor force in California. The evidence that this labor force directly competes with African Americans is mixed. The paper uses the results of a regression analysis of black attitudes towards Latino immigrants to argue that African Americans see immigrants as potential political allies.

Two policy frameworks, environmental justice and the precautionary principle, have begun to transform traditional approaches to environmental policy making and community organizing related to public health. Despite having several important overlapping policy goals, little effort has been made to purposefully integrate these two frameworks. This article discusses preliminary research on environmental inequality in ambient air toxics exposures and associated health risks among schoolchildren in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Results indicate that children of color, namely, Latinos and African Americans, bear the highest burden of estimated cancer and noncancer health risks associated with ambient air toxics exposures while they are in school. The implications of these study results for controversial policy decisions related to school siting and construction in urban districts are discussed within the context of environmental justice and the precautionary principle.

Public schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District are more likely to be located near potentially hazardous facilities, although these areas show slightly lower respiratory health and cancer risks than other tracts. However, most minority students attend schools near hazardous facilities and face significant exposure to toxic air.

Research on male employment in Los Angeles County, CA, indicates that local job growth, the presence of social networks, and spatially based skill differences are the primary factors that account for wage discrepancies. African American, Hispanic American and Asian American males are most affected by spatially based skill mismatches, while Asian immigrants and Anglos are most affected by social networks.

Objective. The 'environmental justice' movement has suggested that demographic inequities characterize the location of hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facilities (TSDFs). While some researchers have found evidence that TSDFs are disproportionately located in minority areas, others attribute TSDF location to nonracial factors such as income and industrial employment. Methods. We used both univariate and multivariate techniques to analyze the location of TSDFs in Los Angeles County, California; the focus on one county allowed us to overcome the problem of 'false' addresses for TSDF sites and to introduce specific land use/zoning variables that are not used in the other studies. Results. In our univariate results and the multivariate model, we find that (1) industrial land use and manufacturing employment do matter, as suggested by critics of environmental justice; (2) income has first a positive, then a negative effect on TSDF location, a pattern that likely reflects the fact that the poorest communities have little economic activity while wealthier communities have the economic and political power to resist negative environmental externalities; and (3) race and ethnicity are still significantly associated with TSDF location, even when percentage African American and percentage Latino are evaluated as separate groupings. Taken together, the results suggest that communities most affected by TSDFs in the Los Angeles area are working-class communities of color located near industrial areas.

This article offers a theoretical framework for designing macroeconomic strategy for El Salvador that will both respect stabilization and structural adjustment needs and enhance social equity. After outlining the largely negative distributional implications of the orthodox policies followed by El Salvador in recent years, we argue that stabilization and efficiency could actually be improved by increased equity and sketch out the elements of an alternative approach that would be distributionally sensitive and thereby help consolidate the peace.

Buffeted by the collapse of trading relations with the former socialist bloc and the continuing US embargo, Cuba has attempted to adjust to external crisis via tighter rationing to curtail demand and traditional planning and sectoral strategies to expand the supply of tradables. This overall program has failed and Cuba has recently begun timid steps toward a more market-oriented approach. We argue that the centerpiece of a new strategy should be a rapid privatization which can be designed to absorb the monetary overhang, widely distribute assets and control, and protect the social safety net that has characterized the Cuban economy.

This paper argues that the deterioration of Latin American private investment in the 1980s may have been largely due to debt difficulties and not the concurrent wave of democratization. After reviewing why more political systems may actually be conducive to investment, we test an investment function for seven countries over 1973-86 that includes traditional economic factors, two debt measures, and several political variables, including measures of democracy, worker power, International Monetary Fund support, and risk. The results are quite congenial for our hypothesis: under several reasonable alternative specifications for the economic determinants, our democracy measure is positively signed and significant.

* This paper studies the relationship between income distribution, class relations, and the debt crisis in Latin America. We develop and test a simple class-analytic surplus model in which debt accumulation and crisis adjustment are both likely to involve significant reductions in wage share. We show that income inequality has worsened in the 1980s and argue that this may actually deepen the regional crisis. We conclude with a discussion of distributionally progressive alternatives.

Environmental justice advocates have recently focused attention on cumulative exposure in minority neighborhoods due to multiple sources of pollution. This article uses U.S. EPA's National Air Toxics Assessment (NATA) for 1996 to examine environmental inequality in California, a state that has been a recent innovator in environmental justice policy. We first estimate potential lifetime cancer risks from mobile and stationary sources. We then consider the distribution of these risks using both simple comparisons and a multivariate model in which we control for income, land use, and other explanatory factors, as well as spatial correlation. We find large racial disparities in California's 'riskscape' as well as inequalities by other factors and suggest several implications for environmental and land use policy.

A collaborative effort between university and community partners in California's central coast that involved the development of a research-based audit is reported. The complex interplay of economic clusters, environmentalist traditions, and demographic changes that led to an initial emphasis on housing is explained.

The new regionalism tends to emphasize the commonalities of central cities and their suburbs. Los Angeles County has surprisingly minor differences between central city and suburb--leading one to wonder why municipal alliances across jurisdictional lines have not been more prominent. The author tackles this anomaly by breaking L.A. County into 58 different areas and tracking demographic and economic change between 1970 and 1990. The analysis suggests that there are important differences in the ethnic and economic dynamics of various subregions. As a result, 'smart-growth' politics may have less salience in Los Angeles than would an alternative regionalism rooted in community-based movements and organizations.

Previous research suggests that minority residential areas have a disproportionate likelihood of hosting various environmental hazards. Some critics have responded that the contemporary correlation of race and hazards may reflect post-siting minority move-in, perhaps because of a risk effect on housing costs, rather than discrimination in siting. This article examines the disproportionate siting and minority move-in hypotheses in Los Angeles County by reconciling tract geography and data over three decades with firm-level information on the initial siting dates for toxic storage and disposal facilities. Using simple t-tests, logit analysis, and a novel simultaneous model, we find that disproportionate siting matters more than disproportionate minority move-in in the sample area. Racial transition is also an important predictor of siting, suggesting a role for multiracial organizing in resisting new facilities.

This paper assesses the Argentine stabilization and market reform strategies since 1989. We argue that Argentina may be penned in by its own success: exchange rate targeting quelled inflation but the resulting real appreciation has limited export and employment growth; microeconomic reforms raised efficiency but have threatened income distribution and hence political stability; exclusive styles of policy-making helped enact reform but have led to corruption and policy insensitivity and contributed to rising social discontent. We close by suggesting how a 'second generation' of reforms could tackle these issues and spread the proceeds of reform to a wider segment of the Argentine public.

A debate on 'environmental justice' is continued. The debate follows research demonstrating that non-white racial groups in Southern California are disproportionately affected by toxic air emissions.